Dressing For Knicks-cess

It's the night before the first New York Knickerbockers playoff game at Madison Square since 2004 and I've got a pair of tickets staring up at me from desk. I'm pacing around the apartment like tomorrow's the first day of high school and I've just moved cross country from dingy North Jersey to a Southern California town where the local toughs learn karate instead of play normal sports.

I'm excited. Because the Knicks might win. I'm nervous. Because the Celtics might. I've got my lunch packed (two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a banana) and my first beer planned (from the stand across from the ticket windows in the LIRR station beneath the Garden). As best I can tell there is just one last thing to square before I try to fitfully sleep as I fret about spasming back muscles and knee blood.

What Knicks gear am I going to wear?

The J. Crew khaki pants that I wore to work today were unwashed and have been missing a button atop the zipper for more than a year. The fabric in the crotch and in the seat is thinning, but I will wear them until they tear. Same goes for the coffee chinos that I'll likely wear to work tomorrow. The remainder of my limited wardrobe of office clothes is in the same state of disrepair. I insist on wearing and re-wearing the same things over and over and am very reluctant to buy new clothes. This is especially true with pants. Because, don't you hate pants?

Work is a place that I attend five days a week, weekly, forever. Knicks games, on the other hand, are things that I could never attend more than 60 times per year and never have more than 35. Yet, my closet and dresser and home office are bursting at the seams with squirreled away Knicks gear as if there will be some circumstance that calls for me to dress solely in blue and orange or to sport the visage of Patrick Ewing at all times. While I admit that this is unlikely I've been amassing Sand Knit, Champion and Mitchell & Ness jerseys like my more successful and dapper friends collect wristwatches.

Hmm... a Knicks watch? I don't have one of those. I mean, I do have a few wristbands but nothing with moving parts. While I check eBay for anything like that, here's a look at the options I'm sifting through in advance of Game 3 tomorrow night.

The Kicks:


Outerwear

The Varsity Jacket: First up is a vintage varsity-style Knicks jacket. It has a dark blue wool body with white leather sleeves just like the one your dad wore when he was going down to Arnold's for a fountain soda. All patches and letters are sewn on and awesome. Easily the classiest choice of all that follows.




The Satin Bomber: Next up, we've got the choice of a new generation. This Starter jacket has a light blue suede body and bright orange leather(ish) sleeves. The patch sewn on the back is satin. Yes, suede and satin. Oh, and orange leather, too.



The Ex-Patrick: I lived in London in 2001. Some would say that I felt compelled to leave New York after the Knicks unceremoniously traded Patrick Ewing to the Seattle Supersonics. Those people would be wrong. I left the States to study at King's College for a year. Nevertheless, Patrick was on my mind. We were both strangers in strange lands that uncertain year. This olive military style coat was purchased at a thrift store up in Camden Town, a northwest London neighborhood full of thrift shops, record stores and flea markets. During many visits, the two best things I purchased were this coat and a bootleg of Nirvana's 1992 performance at the Reading Festival. It was on a cassette. I would eventually lose the cassette. But I managed to repatriate the coat. It originally had East German flags on the sleeves. I cut them off and sewed an American flag on one sleeve and a New York Knicks patch on the other. I later added the commemorative pin from the night that Patrick's No. 33 was retired at the Garden.




T-Shirts & Jerseys:








The Original: My fetish - and after showing you all of this stuff there really isn't much else I can call it - for Knicks gear began before I was 10 years old. Being the only child accompanying my grandfather, father and uncle to 'bockers battles at the Garden back in the late 1980s, there was usually someone with me who felt like spoiling me each time the souvenir stand unveiled a new t-shirt. Illustrations of the players were the big thing on the shirts at the time. This shirt depicting the 1988–89 Atlantic Division Champion Knickerbockers was one of my two favorites. It's a size small and there is a tag with name sewn into it.


I placed a shoe next to the shirt to offer some perspective.

A Knicks Fan's Emotional Playoff Weather Report

I've spent the past several springs and early summers observing the NBA playoffs with the intellectual curiosity and remove of a laboratory scientist. I've studied team chemistry. I've charted passing-lane geometry. I've noted the power and grace of the players involved in those playoffs like a dance critic. And I've observed the customs of variously self-righteous, neurotic and apathetic fanbases like a sociologist. I've even unpacked literary analogs for NBA teams, once comparing LeBron James to the titular character in obscure Shakespeare play Timon of Athens and the heavily-inked Nuggets to Cyrano de Bergerac. Reading rather than rooting has characterized May for me. All of these endeavors have been exceedingly pleasant.

And terrible.

Because I write about sports in this space, and others, because I want to root, root, root for my home team. All the while, I've longed for the euphoria of Patrick's raised arms, embracing the crowd, after Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals in 1994. I pined for the anxiety of game days while I was in grade-school, when I'd struggle to manufacture witty retorts when my classmates in suburban New Jersey gleefully informed me, often correctly, that the Knicks were going to lose to the Chicago Bulls, Indiana Pacers or whomever was the night's opponent. I waited to stoke that same furnace of anger that brightly burned in my tentative teenage spleen when PJ Brown tossed Charlie Ward into the stands during the 1997 playoffs. I even missed the poignancy of the 2-for-18 desolation that had come closer than any other experience to matching the grasping, quicksand anguish of being dumped for the first time that mattered.

Without those things from 2004 to 2011, I was not so much a basketball fan during the NBA postseason as much as I was a basketball enthusiast. Hoops watching, and even hoops blogging, was like constructing scaled sea vessels that would forever stay dry and be kept in bottles or on bookshelves. While I certainly got high from huffing the modeling glue and enjoyed the meticulous handcraft, it was not the same as sailing.



But after years of clear indoor springtime skies, the winds are howling around and inside me, rattling the shutters and trembling beverages in their glasses as if a T-Rex is stomping through the streets of Jersey city. My sterile playoff viewing environment has been ripped from its moorings and spun like Dorothy's farmhouse in that famous Plains twister.

Marveling at the balletic grace and rocket-powered explosiveness of Amar'e Stoudemire in Game 1 flushed my face with the joy of the playoffs while raging at the no-call when Kevin Garnett plainly, efficiently tripped Toney Douglas to free up Ray Allen for the Boston's Game 1 winner on Sunday reacquainted me with the stakes. Watching Carmelo Anthony's regal, irrepressibly Bernard King–like effort rendered something like irrelevant by Jared Jeffrie's timid game-killing effort in the post last night in the penultimate moment of Game 2 of the first-round playoff series between the New York Knickerbockers and the Boston Celtics brought it all back to me. The feeling after Game 2 was agonizing.

And, I'd missed it. Terribly.

After each loss, I was torn between violent and melancholy desires. I wanted to sulk away quickly, quietly to a windowless room and sleep fitfully but determinedly until the next game. But I also felt a fierce Rondoesque straightline drive to HULK!SMASH! home entertainment equipment belonging to myself and others. I wanted to throw laptops against walls. And then tear flat screen televisions from their wall mounts. I wanted present company to leave without a word, especially self-righteous Boston fans cheering Chauncey Billups' knee injury while thinking their seat on the couch represented some sort of moral high ground. Yet I wanted to yell FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKKKKK as loud as I possibly could so that the neighbors would trudge downstairs to complain. And, then I wanted drink strong fermented drinks from ice-filled tumblers until my vision doubled and trebled as my urges to commit violence against myself and others lessened inversely.

Things are tough all over, when the thunder storms start increasing over the southeast and south central portions of my apartment. I get upset, and a line of thunderstorms was developing in the early morning, ahead of a slow moving coldfront, cold blooded, with tornado watches issued shortly before noon Sunday, for the areas including, the western region of my mental health and the northern portions of my ability to deal rationally with my disconcerted precarious emotional situation. -Tom Waits

To further confuse my emotional situation, both games engendered plenty of positive feelings along with all of the negative ones. In each contest, the best and most impressive player was wearing road blues. In Game 1, Amar'e was acrobatic and powerful. He looked like Patrick Ewing playing against the Celtics in 1990, and KG had as good a chance of staying in front of him as I did.




In Game 2, Carmelo Anthony channeled 1984 Bernard King in a talismanic and relentless performance. He scored 42 points, controlled 17 rebounds and doled out six assists (but, sadly, not seven). It was sports heroism (which is very distinct from actual heroism) and its most compelling.



I ooh'd and hot damn'd and hell yeah'd due to the superlative efforts of these two All-Star players who jumped at the chance to be paid exceedingly well by my the Knicks. The final scores of each games does not mean those exclamations weren't exclaimed and that that enthusiasm wasn't felt.

While I have managed to forage enough Knicks-related thrills to survive the regular-season mediocrity of the last few years, I haven't tasted moments as sweet as those for some time. I've subsisted mostly on a diet of Isiah-directed angst and then free-agency-related hope. But on Sunday and Tuesday, I was able to gorge myself on terrific play by STAT and Melo. Of course, the aged Celtics illustrated that being best was not nearly as important as being last in the postseason. In both games, the Celtics scored the last points of the game to secure the win. In both games, the final score threatened to render my elation and enthusiasm meaningless.

After two 2011 playoff games, the 'bockers are boasting an 0-2-0-2 record. Zero wins. Two losses. No draws. And, a pair of moral victories. Despite doing nothing to help the Knicks advance in the 2011 postseason, the slivers of light amidst the storm clouds are not insignificant. These twin silver-lined losses mark the best postseason that the Knicks have had since 2001. Not coincidentally, that was the last time that a basketball game ruined my day so thoroughly.

I was gutted after Vince Carter, Chris Childs and the Toronto Raptors ended the Knicks' 2001 season, closing the brief window of post-Ewing success. The lurching deadstop loss in the decisive fifth game of that series frustrated more than anything I've seen this week (or may see next) because that Knicks squad was trending down. Patrick was gone. Larry Johnson's back was going. Charlie Ward had just revealed himself to be an anti-semite. Without the center, the team could not hold. The sting of these 2011 losses has been mitigated by the fact - or, at least, my belief - that this team is trending up. Win or lose, the Knicks are blossoming into a better team than the Celtics right before our eyes. Of course, it also helps calm my nerves that New York has two home games coming hot down the pike with which they can even this series.

Biologically speaking, pain and discomfort are supposed to motivate us to back away from dangerous or potentially harmful situations. It is a warning signal. It's telling me to run like hell from these Knickerbockers. But like a moth to flame, I'm drawn to this likely losing effort. I've grossly overpaid for my ticket for Game 3 at the Garden on Friday and I'm open to all the pain that the fine print on the back of the stub absolves James Dolan of. Because, as William Faulkner wrote, given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain. After years of vacuous Knicks nothingness, I'm relishing the opportunity for pain and confusion and sadness because it brings the chance for transcendent moments of happiness and an increased likelihood of high fives.

Amar'e Carries Knicks After Walking With Them

With the Knicks having lost 10 of their last 14 games, an anonymous Knicks player was asked if he believes in Amar'e Stoudemire before the conclusion of the Knicks' home-and-away series with the Philadelphia 76ers:

One night I dreamed I was breaking down the court with Amar'e.
Many highlights from my season flashed across Gardenvision.
In each scene I noticed footprints on the court.
Sometimes there were two sets of footprints,
other times there were one set of footprints.
This bothered me because I noticed
that during my slump,
when I was suffering from
anguish, sorrow or defeat,
I could see only one set of footprints.

So I said to the Amar'e,
"You promised me STAT,
that if I followed you,
you would walk with me always.
But I have noticed that during
the most trying periods of my season
there have only been one
set of footprints on the court.
Why, when I needed you most,
you have not been there for me?"

Amar'e replied,
"The times when you have
seen only one set of footprints,
is when I carried you."

Game 1: There
In Friday night's game in Philadelphia, the Knicks saw a potential game-tying runner from Shawne Williams rim out at the buzzer. Shockingly, Williams, the league's most accurate long distance caller, passed on an open, corner three before cutting to the rack.

The 98-100 loss dropped the Knicks to 25-24 on the season and raised the 76ers to within two games of the 'bockers in the standings. Particularly disheartening was that the Sixers outscored the Knicks 27-16 in the fourth quarter to grab a game that was seemingly already secured by a solid Knicks' third quarter effort.

Heading into the final quarter all was well in blue and orange and Non-Star point guard Ray Felton had rediscovering the form that had everyone thinking he'd be named an All-Star for the first time in his career. However, an excruciating scoreless stretch, a few key buckets from Walking Dead extra Elton Brand, who may have officially earned recurring role status with a back-from-the-dead, 33 and 16 game, and that late Williams' miss gave the 76ers a message win.

The Message? "Objects in Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear."

Public perception of the Sixers and the Knicks may still be driven by their disparate starts to the season, but they are both on the same stretch of road from here until the postseason. The Sixers' dismal start is behind them. Just like the Knicks' November-into-December surge. And Philly is gaining.

After the road loss, Stoudemire told the assemblage of digital recorders held in front of his face, "We had a chance to win, we should have played with more energy. Once we came back and took the lead, we let down. We've done that before and we've got to correct it."

Game 2: And Back Again
And, boy, did he ever come correct in the Knicks' 117-103 revenge win yesterday. The performance delivered by Amar'e Stoudemire during the Super Sunday matinee is what franchise-caliber basketball players do: They step up and they carry their teams to must-have victories. They dominate. Stoudemire matched his season-high point total with 41, and he did it by making 17 of his 21 field goal attempts while going a perfect 7 for 7 from the free-throw line. This performance was so economical it could balance the US budget.

The Knicks posted three 30-point quarters in this game after being held to just 16 in the fourth quarter of their come-from-ahead loss two days earlier. A large part of the consistent effort was the ever-increasing production of Amar'e. He started strong and finished stronger: scoring 10 points in the first quarter, 9 in the second, 10 in the third and 12 in the fourth. And, perhaps in hopes of getting even stronger still, Amar'e hit the deck for a few push ups before stepping to the line late in the game.

Pau Should Get A Hand ... At Least One?

Late in the second quarter of Game 2 of the Western Conference Semifinal between the top-seeded Los Angeles Lakers and the No. 5 Utah Jazz there was a fleeting but possibly revealing moment involving L.A. power forward Pau Gasol.

With less than a minute to play in the second quarter and the Jazz at the line, Phil Jackson sent reserve big Josh Powell in for Pau, who would get an early start on his halftime rest. As Powell was introduced, TNT announcer Dick Stockton noted that "Pau Gasol should get a hand as he leaves the game."

Stockton noted this because the Spaniard had scored 9 of the Lakers' previous 11 points and assisted on the other made bucket. He'd also grabbed a passel of offensive rebounds and been every bit the player that had previously inspired heretofore unheard phrasings from the ABC/ESPN announcing crew of Jeff Van Gundy, Mark Jackson and Mike Breen earlier in the playoffs. Much to Jackson's bemusement, Van Gundy had described Pau as "ridiculously multi-faceted." Van Gundy had also marveled at the long-limbed Gasol's ability to make passes that "most point guards can't make."

Stockton and his play-by-play partner Mike Fratello had been generous, albeit less creative than JVG, in their praise through nearly two quarters of Game 2. In other words, nearly all the men assigned to cover the Lakers-Jazz games had been abuzz with praise for Gasol and just beside themselves with admiration. Lakers fans, though, are not nearly as impressed. To Stockton's surprise, there was barely any audible recognition that Pau was coming out of the game.

Stockton quickly covered for the fans at the Staples Center, claiming that they would voice their appreciation for Pau later in the night. But it seems quite clear that those on the outside looking in are far more enamored with Pau than those paying for purple and gold foam fingers. For them, it's still Kobe and Ko-company.

And not only does Pau not get much applause from Lakers fans as he comes off the floor, but he seems to have to pressure the guy sitting adjacent to the bench (who I think is Kobe's dad) to even give him a fist bump. So, I guess in one regard, Stockton was right. Pau got a hand when he left the game. He got one hand from one reluctant dude for a fist bump.

No. 24 may be the closer on the Lakers (even though Pau actually closed out the first round series). He may be the best closer in the game. Possibly the best since Michael Jordan. But he's not the player that makes this iteration of the Lakers the best since the Batman and Robin salad days of the early 2000s. Nope. It's Pau.

According to the statisticians at Basketball-Reference, Pau has 1.6 Win Shares during this postseason. Kobe has 0.8 Win Shares. It's a complicated stat that accounts for how many wins a particular player is actually worth to a team. This postseason, Pau has doubled up Kobe. And he's been the fourth best in all the postseason by this measure after Lebron, Jason Richardson and Jameer Nelson.

He is, as JVG said, ridiculously multi-faceted. He scores better than 18 a game, grabs more than 13 boards, hands out more than 3 assists and blocks at least one shot nearly every game. He runs out on the break. He chases back on defense. And he takes far too many glares from Kobe each and every game. He's hit his free throws at nearly 80 percent and making more than 50% of his field goal attempts. He's up near the top of the leaderboards in offensive rebounds and defensive rebounds. He wants the ball but he doesn't need plays called for him to score game-winning buckets.